Simulacra
By: Airea D. Matthews ; foreword by Carl Phillips
Contributors: Phillips, Carl, 1959- author of foreword
Series: Yale series of younger poets -- v. 111; Yale series of younger poets -- v. 111.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 80
ISBN-13: 9780300223965; 9780300223972
Copyright date: 2017
Subjects: American poetry; American Poets
Description: Winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize A fresh and rebellious poetic voice, Airea D. Matthews debuts in the acclaimed series that showcases the work of exciting and innovative young American poets. Matthews's superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication. In his foreword, series judge Carl Phillips calls this book "rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant." This is poetry that breaks new literary ground, inspiring readers to think differently about what poems can and should do in a new media society where imaginations are laid bare and there is no thought too provocative to send out into the world.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 75-77).
Table of contents: title: Foreword  -- Carl Phillips; title: Meeting want.; title: Rebel prelude -; title: The mine owner's wife -; title: Letters to my would-be lover on geometry and ponds -; title: Temptation of the composer -; title: HERO(i)N -; title: On meeting want for the first time -; title: The good dentist's wife -; title: Meeting Anne Sexton --; title: ...And repeating.; title: Sexton texts a dead addict's daughter during Polar vortex -; title: Meeting want (again) -; title: An ingenue texts Sexton before the honey moon -; title: From the pocket of his lip -; title: Sexton texts a backslider after breaking lent -; title: Rebel opera -; title: Pious -; title: Sekhment's conceit -; title: Select passages from The holy writ of us -; title: Letters to my would-be lover on dolls and repeating -; title: Blind calculus (from Barthes' A lover's discord) -; title: Quiet desperation texts Sexton on Independence Day -; title: The lover problem in analogue (from Wittgenstein's Lost black book) -; title: Confessions from here -; title: Dodecaphony -; title: Can? (from Wittgenstein's Lost black book) --; title: Who.; title: If my late grandmother were Gertrude Stein -; title: Descent of the composer -; title: Sexton texts Tituba from a bird conservatory -; title: Narcissus tweets -; title: Sekhmet after hours -; title: Privileged ghosts of Paris -; title: Anne Sexton checks the composer's vitals (from the archived transcripts) -; title: Psyche on Prozac -; title: Sekhmet's query -; title: Rebel fugue --; title: Notes --; title: Acknowledgments.